


Alone Together

by knight_of_thyme (ravenic)



Series: HSWC 2014 [10]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: First Meetings, Homestuck Shipping World Cup 2014, Team Moirallegiance 2014, many first meetings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-12 03:52:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5651521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/knight_of_thyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirk and Roxy have met for the first time many times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alone Together

**Author's Note:**

> my submission for hswc 2014 main round 2: cycles  
> it didn't end up being our final entry, but i love roxy♦dirk like a lot and i was really happy with this

TG: hello?  
TT: Who are you.  
TG: omg your real  
TT: Yes, I am. Who or what the hell are you and how did you find this account?  
TG: roxy lalonde, hakker extrordindar  
TG: *extraordinaire  
TT: Are you human?  
TG: r u?  
TT:  
TT: Yes.  
TG: me too!!  
TT: … I thought I was the only one.  
TG: sodid i! thats why i made the progrgam to find toher active acconts – like yorus!  
TT: Well then.  
TG: u still havent told me ur name tho  
TT:  
TG: come on i told u mine  
TT: It’s  
TT: Dirk.  
: Dirk Strider.  
TG: hello drik!  
TG:*dirk!  
TT: Are you drunk, or do you just type badly?  
TG: uh  
TG: both! i think  
TT: Sigh.  
TG: spelings aside, we are the last humus on earth  
TG: *humans  
TG: (hehe)  
TG: and i think that we are goin to be gret friends!

*

Two lonely children, separated by hundreds of miles, find each other one day through a chat program.

It is the beginning.

Dirk builds robots. He lives in an apartment building in the middle of the ocean, and his brother was a famous movie director. He starts out kind of withdrawn, but it doesn’t take long for Roxy to get him to talk. He has no one, just like her.

Roxy drinks and hacks and likes cats a lot. She lives with things called carapaces, little hard-shelled creatures that don’t talk but sometimes like to listen to her ramble.  
Two children separated by hundreds of miles, as different as night and day, but they are far more similar than they might seem – he does like talking, and beneath the layers of sarcasm and irony is a heart truer than steel; she’s a lot smarter than the drunken teenager she seems to be at first glance. After all, she taught herself how to get into computers’ souls and bend them to her will, just to find someone, anyone, for her to talk to.

They talk a lot. Dirk has only ever had his robots, and carapaces don’t exactly make good conversation partners. It’s not like either of them has much else to do, anyway.  
They talk, but it’s only ever in text. Roxy’s computer, no matter what she tries, can’t handle audio, and the chat program doesn’t have a video component. So they talk, yes, and they grow to know virtually everything about each other, but they have never seen each other’s faces, never heard each other’s voices. Just colored text filling screen after screen, orange and pink blurring into a mass that might, if one wanted it to, be called friendship.

*

They meet two more people, uu and UU – one kind, sweet, caring, helpful; the other a cruel and stupid brute who seems to have nothing better to do with his time than rant at them in broken sentences of dark gray.

With uu’s help, Roxy gets an extension on the chat program that allows them to – if she understood uu right – talk to people in the past.

That’s how they meet Jane Crocker and Jake English. Jane is the heiress to the Batterwitch’s empire, which at first is a major turn-off for both of the future kids – she’s the reason everyone but them is dead. But Jane is nice, albeit a bit clueless (and in denial) about the woman who currently rules the Crocker kingdom. Jake lives on an island by himself, except for all the strange giant white monsters. He’s silly but sweet, and it’s not long before Dirk is keeping Roxy up all night talking about him.

And then, as it was always fated to happen, the game begins.

It’s chaos at first, dying and flying and total chaos, but when the dust settles, there are four new players in SBURB Alpha.

*

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

It’s like meeting a whole new person, Roxy thinks. Dirk is tall, taller than she’d imagined, with golden hair not quite as pale as her own, spiky but soft-looking. She wants to run her hands through it. Does it feel like wool? She doesn’t know much else that is soft. He hadn’t been kidding about the ridiculous shades he wears, but somehow he makes it work. He’s a little tanner than she is, but not much.

They could be siblings.

It’s different, seeing someone in the flesh after so long knowing them only as orange text and perfect grammar and syntax on a computer screen. And, of course, nothing could have prepared Roxy for her first encounter with another actual human being.

He’s real.

It’s like meeting a whole new person, Dirk thinks. Roxy is even skinnier than he is, pale, with pink eyes that might be weird to anybody except a guy whose eyes are orange. But the biggest thing he notices is just the liveliness, the exuberance, that emanates from her like nothing he’s ever known. The ocean is alive, but it is deep and unpredictable and he’s never trusted it. Birds are always far away and unkind, stealing what they can from him and screeching at him if he comes near. Robots move, even speak, but they aren’t alive the way Roxy is alive (the way she’s always been, reminding him, both openly and unintentionally, that he was human too, not made of metal and gears). She’s human. He’s human.

They could be soulmates.

It’s different, seeing the girl he’s spent so long talking to, opening up to, as something more than pink letters and terrible typos. Then, she could almost have been part of the machine, a fever dream. But here she is, solid and moving and alive, and he’s only ever known robots so he has nothing to compare this to –seeing an actual human being.  
She’s real.

*

It’s like getting to know each other all over again. There are entire new things to learn – face, voice, behavior, body language, mannerisms that don’t translate to text. It’s like they are completely different people.

Except really, they aren’t. He’s still Dirk, and his body moves the same way he writes, smooth and controlled and impossible to read into. But she can. She’s still Roxy, and she talks the same way she types, wild and uninhibited, so out there that it isn’t always easy to see who she really is. But he can.

There isn’t a word for what they are. She loves him. He loves her. But it’s different from the things they’ve read, from the way they feel about the others. Siblings? Soulmates? Friends? They don’t know. They don’t really need to.

He’s the one she goes to when she misses the simplicity, the ordinariness, of home. He’s calm and stable and solid and they can sit side by side and talk, on LOTAC or LOPAN or anywhere else because really, she doesn’t care. All that matters is that Dirk is there, the way he was in her computer but even more now, because he is real and right next to her. It helps.

She’s the one he goes to when he needs to learn how to do human things. He is in love with Jake (different in-love than with Roxy, but love all the same) (Jane loves him too, and Roxy may not understand people very well but she knows this means trouble), but Jake is outgoing and improvisational where Dirk needs to be in control of anything he does. So when he want to learn how to hug a human being, he goes to Roxy, and they practice until he is comfortable. It helps.

She is the only one he lets his guard down around. He is the only one she is truly serious with. They have met each other for the first time twice. They don’t care. Dirk – Roxy – that’s something that will remain the same, no matter how much else changes around them.

*

They play the game, and after a long time and a lot of fighting (monsters, each other, themselves), they win. They win, and the other kids who say they are their kids and/or grandkids and maybe also their parents and/or grandparents, more trolls than they can count (some of the other humans were surprised by aliens, but Roxy’s grown up around carapaces – this is just another form of life, and Dirk takes on trolls just as easily as he did robots or cherubs or seagulls – they’re all the same in the end).

And then they meet again. First on a computer, then in a game, and now, finally, in real life.

They know each other. The end of the game meant all alternate-self memories were restored to the alpha self, and so they know each other as Mom and Bro, as Dirk and Roxy, as so many different versions of the same selves.

But it doesn’t matter. They are the same in the end. They know that, and that’s all that matters.

Time and again, in different worlds, different realities, they find each other. They still don’t know what they would call it, but that’s okay. Dirk won’t look for a word, and Roxy won’t try to make one up. They are who they are, alone, together, but in the end, whether surrounded by life and hope or alone in the void, their hearts are one.

**Author's Note:**

> _Let's be alone together_   
>  _We could stay young forever_
> 
> \- Fall Out Boy, Alone Together


End file.
